Did Taylor Swift Really Make 65,000 People Register to Vote?

After Swift endorsed Democrats in the upcoming midterms, Tennessee saw a spike in last-minute registration.

Taylor Swift has tried very hard to keep politics out of her career. Unfortunately, no one has that luxury anymore, and in her silence white nationalists and the alt-right adopted her as their ideal woman, and in her insistence on remaining apolitical, Swift inadvertently allowed the fetishizing to continue. Until this week.

On Sunday, Swift endorsed two Democrats running in her adopted home state of Tennessee, saying on Instagram that she was horrified by Republican Senate candidate Masha Blackburn. Per news reports:

"Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me," Swift said. "I cannot vote for someone who will not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin color, gender, or who they love."

She went on to list that Blackburn voted against equal pay for women and the Reauthorization of Violence Against Women Act. Swift also said Blackburn believes businesses have the right to refuse service to gay couples and that they should not have a right to marry.

"These are not MY Tennessee values. I will be voting for Phil Bredesen for Senate and Jim Cooper for House of Representatives," she said.

Unsurprisingly, Swift seems to have burned some conservative bridges with the endorsement. Her white nationalist fan base is disappointed. Donald Trump said she probably doesn't know anything about the candidates and he likes her music "25 percent less" now, and famed opinion-haver Tomi Lahren declared that she had no love for Swift, Kanye West, or any celebrity sharing an uninformed political opinion. Many people on Twitter caught the huge, oblivious irony of Lahren's statement, including a high profile drag queen:

But it looks like Swift's endorsement may have had an effect after all. The registration website Vote.org said that the 24 hours after Swift's post its second busiest of the year day, with a bump of more than 65,000 registrations. Per BuzzFeed News:

"Vote.org saw [Tennessee] registrations spike specifically since Taylor's post," [Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for Vote.org] said. The organization has received 5,183 in the state so far this month — at least 2,144 of which were in the last 36 hours, she said, up from 2,811 new Tennessee voter registrations for the entire month of September and just 951 in August.

Guthrie said the site had also seen a big jump in the number of visitors since Swift's post, with 155,940 unique visitors in the last 24 hours — second only to the number of people who visited on National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 25 when there were 304,942 unique visitors. (The average daily user count for the site is 14,078 in 2018.)

"Thank God for Taylor Swift," said Guthrie.

Whether the surge in registration is really connected to Swift is debatable though. ProPublica's elections reporter Jessica Huseman pointed out that this week is the deadline for voter registration in many states (including more than a dozen on Tuesday alone), so an uptick in late registrations is expected.

So Swift may not deserve all the credit, especially since the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight has energized both parties. People may see this as a battle for the survival of U.S. democracy or a continuation of the 2009 VMAs spat between her and Kanye. Either way though, registration's up.